Steepest drop in global temperature on record

Stunning new data indicates El Nino drove record highs in global temperatures suggesting rise may not be down to man-made emissions

Global average temperatures over land have plummeted by more than 1C

Comes amid mounting evidence run of record temperatures about to end

The fall, revealed by Nasa satellites, has been caused by the end of El Nino

By David Rose

Global average temperatures over land have plummeted by more than 1C since the middle of this year – their biggest and steepest fall on record. According to satellite data, the late 2016 temperatures are returning to the levels they were at after the 1998 El Nino.

The news comes amid mounting evidence that the recent run of world record high temperatures is about to end. The fall, revealed by Nasa satellite measurements of the lower atmosphere, has been caused by the end of El Nino – the warming of surface waters in a vast area of the Pacific west of Central America.

Some scientists, including Dr Gavin Schmidt, head of Nasa’s climate division, have claimed that the recent highs were mainly the result of long-term global warming.
Others have argued that the records were caused by El Nino, a complex natural phenomenon that takes place every few years, and has nothing to do with greenhouse gas emissions by humans.

The new fall in temperatures suggests they were right.

Big El Ninos always have an immense impact on world weather, triggering higher than normal temperatures over huge swathes of the world. The 2015-16 El Nino was probably the strongest since accurate measurements began, with the water up to 3C warmer than usual.

It has now been replaced by a La Nina event – when the water in the same Pacific region turns colder than normal.

This also has worldwide impacts, driving temperatures down rather than up.
The satellite measurements over land respond quickly to El Nino and La Nina. Temperatures over the sea are also falling, but not as fast, because the sea retains heat for longer.

This means it is possible that by some yardsticks, 2016 will be declared as hot as 2015 or even slightly hotter – because El Nino did not vanish until the middle of the year.
But it is almost certain that next year, large falls will also be measured over the oceans, and by weather station thermometers on the surface of the planet – exactly as happened after the end of the last very strong El Nino in 1998. If so, some experts will be forced to eat their words.

Last year, Dr Schmidt said 2015 would have been a record hot year even without El Nino.
‘The reason why this is such a warm record year is because of the long-term underlying trend, the cumulative effect of the long-term warming trend of our Earth,’ he said. This was ‘mainly caused’ by the emission of greenhouse gases by humans.

Dr Schmidt also denied that there was any ‘pause’ or ‘hiatus’ in global warming between the 1998 and 2015 El Ninos.

But on its website home page yesterday, Nasa featured a new study which said there was a hiatus in global warming before the recent El Nino, and discussed why this was so. Last night Dr Schmidt had not returned a request for comment.

However, both his own position, and his Nasa division, may be in jeopardy. US President-elect Donald Trump is an avowed climate change sceptic, who once claimed it was a hoax invented by China.

Other experts have also disputed Dr Schmidt’s claims. Professor Judith Curry, of the Georgia Institute of Technology, and president of the Climate Forecast Applications Network, said yesterday: ‘I disagree with Gavin. The record warm years of 2015 and 2016 were primarily caused by the super El Nino.’

The slowdown in warming was, she added, real, and all the evidence suggested that since 1998, the rate of global warming has been much slower than predicted by computer models – about 1C per century.

David Whitehouse, a scientist who works with Lord Lawson’s sceptic Global Warming Policy Foundation, said the massive fall in temperatures following the end of El Nino meant the warming hiatus or slowdown may be coming back.

‘According to the satellites, the late 2016 temperatures are returning to the levels they were at after the 1998 El Nino.

The data clearly shows El Nino for what it was – a short-term weather event,’ he said.Full story & comments

“Others have argued that the records were caused by El Nino, [begin parenthetical] a complex natural phenomenon that takes place every few years, and has nothing to do with greenhouse gas emissions by humans [end parenthetical] .

“The new fall in temperatures suggests they were right.”

Who is ‘they,’ you ask? This could not possibly be any clearer. ‘They’ obviously refers to ‘Others,’ in the previous sentence.

The federal “scientific” community has been behaving badly, spreading PC propaganda favoring carbon taxes instead of scientific truths. For the first time in DECADES I am reading “news” facts that are somewhere near truth; that energy STORAGE mechanisms (Gulfstream, El Nino et al) are responsible for the average global temperature. Sunlight is the huge energy gorilla in the room. We generally loose by infrared radiation back into cold space as much as we gain every day, except for a few scraps being sqirreled away in ocean waters. Said oceans meandering and cloud cover modulate the retained energy from month to month which air circulation carries over lands. Follow the oceans and air mass movements! Trash Gore & Co.

My computation of our energy generation via carbon products is that our earth absorbs 7,000 times more energy from sunlight than is produced by the combustion of carbon products. The average earth temperature uptick from said combustion is 0.011 degrees C (+0.02F). Really the vast majority of that occurs on city properties. Figuring that city property is at best 1% of the earth’s surface, this means that the average CITY temperature could be as much as 2 degrees F warmer because of the carbon combustion going on within city limits. That’s where most Liberals live, so little wonder that they are so convinced and incensed about this matter. But Mother Earth overall remains largely unperturbed by carbon combustion. Trash Gore & Co.

The satellite measurements over land respond quickly to El Nino and La Nina. Temperatures over the sea are also falling, but not as fast, because the sea retains heat for longer.
===
…and the lag says it was 100% El Nino….and without it temps would have continued to fall

The $3 Trillion dollar question is not will 2016 be warmer that 19 years ago (1998), but rather is global warming over.

There is now observational evidence of cooling of the surface ocean in regions that are most affected by solar cycle changes.

The cult of CAGW told us over and over and over that almost 100% of the warming in the last 150 years was due to CAGW. The cult of CAGW conveniently limited the discussion to ‘recorded’ temperature the last 150 years, rather than the full paleo climatic record (say this interglacial period, last 11,000 years for example)

It is a fact that planetary temperature has increased and decreased in the paleo record, in high latitude regions correlating with solar cycle changes. The warming we have experienced in the last 150 years is high latitude warming matching the past warming pattern. 100% of the past cyclic warming periods in the paleo record were followed by cooling periods when the solar cycle abruptly changed.

The fall, revealed by Nasa satellite measurements of the lower atmosphere

I was not aware that NASA provide an extraction of the temperature of the ” lower atmosphere”. What dataset is this unattributed graph supposed to be?

I don’t see the massive in UAH Oct 2016 and November is not finished yet, so where does this final point come from? Has David Rose just made this up?

The article also describes temperature anomaly maps as “satellite images” which is BS. Clearly Rose has little idea what he is talking about. Perhaps Monkey face needs to have a chat and bring him upto speed.

If I have properly comprehended the various comments here – and I am certainly fallible, and may be wrong – the not-so-gradual change to the weather station database, over the years:
ignoring
AAA Rural stations – against urban/airport stations
BBB ‘more northerly’ against ‘more southerly’
and possibly by reviewing marine stations — appear to have allowed a ‘trend’ to be ‘visible’ – I didn’t say “manufactured” – from data, not tortured at all.

george, we can expect the post announcing the pause to be delayed exactly as long as it takes for the pause to reappear. The big blip caused by the recent El Nino is still in the record, just as the big blip caused by the last big El Nino is still in the record. For the pause to go back to the old pre-El Nino days the temperatures will have to be a lot colder for quite a long time. My guess is that it will never go back that far again (at least for hundreds or thousands of years.)

What will happen is that this recent big blip will remain in the records, and a new pause will start from this current El Nino. It is already here – the new pause is approximately 6 months old.

This new pause will almost certainly persist for a few years as that is the nature of this sort of series. Large positive blips will cause a statistical pause of this sort.

What helped me visualize this was imagining a person standing still on the floor for say 20 minutes, then going upstairs for 1 minute (or jumps for 1 data point (number 20)), then returning to the ground floor and staying there. We plot height above the floor every minute. The slope of the line up to the jump is flat. The slope is positive after the jump but only until 39 minutes. After this the slope tips downwards as there are more points after the jump than before it. The jump is acting like a pivot. The slope will always be negative after this time.

Regarding the pause, this is defined as the furthest we can go back from present and find no positive slope.

At point 20 there is no pause – the slope is always positive going backwards.
At point 21 the pause is 2 minutes, data point 19, 20 and 21.
At point 22 the pause is 4 minutes; data points 18 to 22.
And so on – each data point added after the jump extends the pause by 2 data points.

For a series that is flat punctuated by positive blips this is what we would expect. The pause would extend backwards from the blip as far as we have moved forward in time, “balancing” on the blip.

If we get a second equal blip at 40 minutes, what do we see?

At point 40 the pause now extends from the second blip back to the first – that is 20 minutes from 20 minutes to 40 minutes.

Each time period back on the floor extends the pause by 2 time periods again as the flat line balances on the two blips.

For a flat period punctuated by equal sized blips we would never see the pause smaller than the time between the blips.

If the second blip is slightly bigger than the first, then it takes slightly longer for the pause to go back to the first blip, but only slightly. After a 10% bigger blip the pause is restored back to 20 minutes after just one more minute.

What we have seen is a pause that extended back to just before the first blip (the 1998 El Nino) for nearly 20 years, but never extended back much further. This is consistent with a blip superimposed on a positive slope. It is not consistent with a blip superimposed on a zero slope.

What I think we will see is the new pause extending back to just before the new blip but never reaching back to the first blip. This is consistent with positive blips superimposed on a positive slope. It is not consistent with positive blips superimposed on a zero slope.

Peter,
We may be “starting to see some sense” – but don’t hold your breath.
Various organs – even the (once-)non-establishment ‘Private Eye’, have been discombobulated by Brexit – and The Donald!
Various efforts in Europe – Austrian re-run; the Swiss vote not to revert to the Bronze Age; the Italian constitutional referendum; and next year, elections in Germany and France may bolster the feeling.

Let us hope for outcomes that help most folk.
If one or two are Vampire Squid bankers – well, as long as most folk get helped, I can live with a billionaire not having to cadge cigarette butts.

One of my local Television stations has started to use the term “Energy Poverty” on-air; They had years ago removed a meteorologist from on-air weather and science reporting shortly after he had audaciously described the Climate Change debate in a neutral voice. So it does seem to me that there is subtle shift in the Main Stream Media’s leaning on the issue.

Not surprising since the guy has a history running away from debate. Hubris and elitism are not the best tools a scientist can use to make a case. How this has worked for Schmidt for so long is troubling.

Alx November 28, 2016 at 8:23 am
& all others in this chain. Note the second paragraph from the article . Nasa Website. Someone(s) Just stabbed Dr Schmidt in the back. Not with a mere knife mind you, but with a Macedonian Sarissa.
He is probably over turning desks in rampaging hunt for fellow who posted the New study on the website.

“Dr Schmidt also denied that there was any ‘pause’ or ‘hiatus’ in global warming between the 1998 and 2015 El Ninos.

But on its website home page yesterday, Nasa featured a new study which said there was a hiatus in global warming before the recent El Nino, and discussed why this was so. Last night Dr Schmidt had not returned a request for comment.”

I do not know the motive for the individual who placed the study on the website but this is going to cause a stir.

I find it revealing that the alarmists, who supposedly fight against global warming, actually deny the existence of the Pause. You’d think they’d be happy about 18 years of essentially flat temperatures. But instead they always seemed so pleased and relieved to proclaim that 2015 and 2016 were the warmest years on record, at times almost triumphant.

Counter intuitively they’ll likely be unhappy to hear that the Pause has returned and could be 20 years in duration now.

But you see, if the temperatures remained flat for 18 years while CO2 monotonously climbed, there is a problem supporting the theory and without the theory, they have no jobs, no prestige, and no grant money to spend. They MUST prevent a pause at all costs – their whole way of life depends on it!

There you are again, with the AMO. Keep it up. Maybe we’ll catch on.
That explains much of the elevated Arctic sea and air temps this season.
The recently departed El Niño takes care of the rest.
(afaics)

All of this was predicted in WUWT several years ago The strong El Nino raising global temperatures can in no way be interpreted as AGW by CO2, because if it was, then temperatures would continue to rise during the La Nina phase. The so called “scientists” have shot themselves in both feet this time.

Unless Senate Republicans put a final stake in the heart of the filibuster, getting legislation to reorganize NASA (eliminating any GISS climate work) to President Trump’s desk would first have to clear a senate democrat filibuster. GISS is in Manhattan and works with Columbia University. Senator Schumer (D-NY, senate minority leader) would filibuster any legislation that eliminates GISS and its jobs and funding to ColU.

Appropriations bills though can avoid the filibuster, and thus simply defunding GISS would the politically expedient method of eliminating politicized climate science work by redundant agencies such as GISS.

Trump’s NASA administrator could redirect GISS back to its original charter of basic space science theoretical work. That would entail political risk drawing the wrath of Congressional democrats. Such a re-alignment would result in a major staff upheaval as the academic disciplines of atmospheric climate research are vastly different from academics who study space plasma, solar wind manetosphere interactions, and gavitational interactions between planets and the sun. Plus there are (NASA and NSF) grant tie-ins to Columbia researcers.

GISS in its current state is like an invasive, soft tissue tumor that has wrapped and interwoven itself into Columbia U atmospheric Earth Sciences and the climate modeling community. Simply telling a large group of climate-atmspheric scientists to become space plasma physicists simply doesn’t work. And the best way to unpoliticize NASA administration to to get the politics out of NASA administration. Leave the politics to Congress.

The best option is for Congress to specifically forbid NASA to use appropriated funds for Earh Climate research and redirect any non-redundant work funding to NOAA.

NASA, GISS and possibly all of the department subsections would operate their budgets under finance numbers.

As JoelOBryan points out, the agencies are at the beck and call of the President; as is their organization and expenditures.

Political noise? Perhaps.
But only noise. Outside of refusing to authorize funds, Congress and especially the Senate has little say in the running of an agency so long as they operate legally.

I’d like to see those Democrat Senator yahoos pull another climate blindside using false experts without GISS and NOAA backing.

Almost as much as hearing those Senator benefactors scream when the green massacre mills lose their subsidies, fixed high prices, publicize how much rare wildlife they kill and have to pony up for grid improvements.

I think most of us wouldn’t oppose transitioning GISS from NASA to NOAA. I’d strongly approve of moving it from Manhattan (some of the most expensive commercial real estate in the world) to a location that is more “sustainable”. There’s another Columbia I can think of that would be quite appropriate – in SC.

I don’t have a problem with the closed incandescent lamp factory, so long as its demise was a result of free market forces. Nobody should be forced to make buggy whips, just to provide employment for people who know how to make them.

I’ve never bought a buggy whip; never even seen one actually. But I have already purchased the last incandescent lamp I will ever own.

But I did have to wait for a full half century to pass, since I was one of a few, who jokingly declared: ” One day, we will be lighting the whole world with these things. ”
We were in a darkened auditorium at Monsanto Company’s Central Research Labs, in St Louis (county) MO, looking at the dull red glow of a small section of GaAs0.6P0.4 wafer under an assembly binocular microscope. We also joked that if we knew the name of a company investing in GaN technology, we could make a killing by selling its stock short.

But that was long before Shoji Nakamura came on the scene at Nichia in Japan.

The 98 EN was followed by the 99-00 LA. That LA (an upwelling of colder than normal waters in the East Trop Pac) coincided with the rapidly rising solar activity to the SC23 peak in 01. So if the 98 EN was an impulse, the following solar activity drove was the steprise.

SC24 is now on a 3 to 4 year disciplined decline to minimum somewhere likely in late 2020 or 2012. Any LA that persists in this decade could see a stepdown in global temps and a final relaxation of the climate system back to conditions approaching 1975 state by 2022.

A feedback response that overshoots, is just one option available to process control designers.

What happens if that overshoot that is claimed to be necessary, leads to a functional failure; the governor gizmo snaps in half ??

” Settling time ” is commonly spoken of, when talking about a system returning to a ” set point “; and virtually any feedback system has a set point that it is trying to return to.

And there is no assurance that settling time is reduced by overshoots. A monotonic non overshooting response can settle faster that one that overshoots. It’s a question of design.
It is true, that the system can be made to return to the set point faster, if overshoots are permitted. That is NO assurance that the system will REMAIN within an acceptable error band sooner, and that is the measure of control success. How fast can you return and remain within an acceptable error from the set point.

Propagation delays certainly make it harder to avoid oscillations about the set point. They don’t necessarily make it impossible to achieve monotonic response.

As I’ve been told by several warmists, since all natural cycles are cycle, over time the average out so they don’t have to be considered by the models.
Of course when the tuning period is a time of upswing in 3 to 4 of the natural cycles, that can’t possibly have any impact on the “projections”.

Their hypothesis is PDO (including El Niño / La Niña) is natural, so they run constrained models with actual data for the western pacific. There hyposthesis is they they can then separate out the 2 effects. In the 1910-1940 global warming, they give PDO almost full credit, etc.

Their hypothesis is PDO (including El Niño / La Niña) is natural, so they run constrained models with actual data for the western pacific. There hyposthesis is they they can then separate out the 2 effects. In the 1910-1940 global warming, they give PDO almost full credit, etc.

You can see in the swings of min and max, the warming can not me from a loss of cooling. Period. What it looks like they are, are the ocean cycles driving changes to the jet stream, which alters the path warm water vapor out of the tropics take, when more of it goes over land, it’s warmer even though the total heat content didn’t change.

Those wily polar bears don’t have to break through the ice. The seals maintain their own breathing holes. The bear just has to wait beside a hole until the seal sticks its nose above the water to deftly remove the seal. What an easy life. :-) It’s practically like lying under a tree with your mouth open waiting for the fruit to drop.

You’re actually kinda close with the mention of too- thick ice being bad for the bears.
Susan Crockford has explained how thick Spring ice is bad for the seals, who can’t haul out of the sea to deliver their pups.

The article is a little out of date, since the La Nina event is already looking like an ENSO neutral state. Who knows what 2017 will bring, but there are no signs get than an El Nino will take hold to make it warmer than 2016, so saying a temperature drop is coming would be a safe bet.

Blaming AGW and especially CO2 is suppose to show up more over land, so I presume that’s why this has been chosen. If the rise over land is shown to be lost, then therefore there is no way it was caused by AGW in the first place. Hence, backs up what I and others have mentioned before about it being caused by El Nino’s.

The large heat capacity of the oceans creates a buffer such that it takes longer to recognise change, and of course, it also impacts upon the extent of change. there is a great eal more energy entrained in the oceans than in the atmosphere.

La Nina conditions shove leftover El Nino-warmed surface waters north and south into higher latitude Pacific waters and westward into the Indian Ocean. Those warm waters intruding into other ocean basins are a lagged response to El Nino warming.

No, its just the coverage bias of RSS in Antartica, UAH has not fallen as strong as RSS, if you see RSS in TTT you will see the decrease is smaller.

And..

Its not because of transition from El-Nino to La-Nina, its because of strong continental cooling caused by extrem early WACCy-Pattern. And so its no wonder, the coming month should more cooler as its in Oktober for RSS TLT.

No, its just the coverage bias of RSS in Antartica, UAH has not fallen as strong as RSS, if you see RSS in TTT you will see the decrease is smaller.

And..

Its not because of transition from El-Nino to La-Nina, its because of strong continental cooling caused by extrem early WACCy-Pattern. And so its no wonder, the coming month should more cooler as its in Oktober for RSS TLT.

The question I would be interested in seeing an answer to is when, reasonably speaking, can we claim accuracy in measuring El Niño events . My reason for being interested in this is the El Niño events in the late nineteenth century and in particular the 1876-79 one which killed tens of millions and caused catastrophic droughts – lasting three years in some places – throughout the mid-latitudes.

I see nothing in the run of modern El Ninos that remotely matches the descriptions of what was going on in the 1870s, even allowing for our ability to moderate the worst effects of such events in terms of aid to famine areas.

I would think this question has some importance in reference to the narrative of “unprecedented” weather or climate claims in “modern” times. Unless it is going to be claimed that time works differently once you go back further than 25 years.

The satellite sea surface temperature data is only about 30 to 40 years old and vastly better than anything else we have had. Whale the limited climate data for the 1870’s may indicate a a 3 warming trend we cannot say for sure that was a el Nino. We also don’t precisely know how long it lasted. Or it may have been like the 90’s and 2015 when see surface temperatures were elevated for year or more before a large El Nino occurred.

China and India also now have more water storage facilities, more acreage cultivated and higher crop yields and varieties, as well as improved national and international relief organization. This despite larger populations.

The question I would be interested in seeing an answer to is when, reasonably speaking, can we claim accuracy in measuring El Niño events . My reason for being interested in this is the El Niño events in the late nineteenth century and in particular the 1876-79 one which killed tens of millions and caused catastrophic droughts – lasting three years in some places – throughout the mid-latitudes.

You are right! This edition in 1877/78 had terrific consequences, mostly located in the Southern Hemisphere if I well remember what I read some years ago.

I’ve been saying for what 10 years, the warming is not from co2, it can’t been because of how fast the entire world can cool at once. It had a prelude to this in the 97 El Nino cycle, that you can’t see because they show you average temperature.

The dataset used is RSS v3.3 TLT which was not updated when RSS moved to V4.0.
The dataset used is for LAND only, and you may just have noticed that the NH (by far the biggest land area of the hemispheres) is decending rapidly into winter. Go look at Siberian temps, oh, and go look at Arctic ones.
Exactly.

http://www.remss.com
Quote: “The lower tropospheric (TLT) temperatures have not yet been updated at this time and remain V3.3. The V3.3 TLT data suffer from the same problems with the adjustment for drifting measurement times that led us to update the TMT dataset. V3.3 TLT data should be used with caution.”

David Rose writes: “The satellite measurements over land respond quickly to El Nino and La Nina. Temperatures over the sea are also falling, but not as fast, because the sea retains heat for longer.”

Also, a La Nina is not the opposite of an El Nino. An El Nino releases warm water from beneath the surface of the western tropical Pacific and places that warm water on the surface. A La Nina recharges the heat lost from below the surface of the tropical Pacific by decreasing cloud cover and allowing more sunlight to warm the tropical Pacific to depth.

I’ve always thought of it as a cycle. Relaxation or reversal of Trade Winds allowing the higher temp W Pac water to travel to the E Pac. The now lowered temp W Pac water produces less clouds allowing more sunlight to raise the water temp to depth of about 100m. Now what causes the change in Trade Winds?

Perhaps the change in ocean surface temperature that inevitably accompanies warming “to depth”. Not enough surface warming to create the towering ninoesque sun blocking convection. Maybe not enough to even show as anomaly, but enough to foster robust Hadley circulation that drives the trades.

The trades in turn skim off the warming surface water (keeping it from getting out of hand) and pile it up against Indonesia to some depth where it cannot radiate efficiently to the atmosphere.

This can’t go on forever so when the pesky QBO does an about face at just the wrong moment and disrupts the Hadley cells, all that piled up hot water at Indonesia does an exit stage right…

“Some scientists, including Dr Gavin Schmidt, head of Nasa’s climate division, have claimed that the recent highs were mainly the result of long-term global warming.
Others have argued that the records were caused by El Nino, a complex natural phenomenon that takes place every few years, and has nothing to do with greenhouse gas emissions by humans.”
Really, who are these scientists who argue El Nino is is the cause of these records? Even Judith Curry (a skeptical scientist) only says the warming is “primarily” caused by El Nino. I think you will find she is a lone wolf among scientists. I’d been keen to hear the names of others work in the field who do not attribute the recent records to long term warming caused by increased greenhouse gases. i.e what Dr Schmidt is saying.
Here is a logical question that demolishes any notion that El Nino is responsible for warming. If it is, why has this event, that has been happening for (at least) thousands of years, not meant we are hotter than we are?

Mike the Morlock
“I prefer the more effective “Blah,blah blah…..”
Highly intelligent response thank you. Now perhaps for the thinking ones here you might want to say which aspects of what I wrote are so incorrect. Or perhaps Blah….. is all you have?

Then you would have lost that bet. We have a fairly good idea from measuring past El Nino and La Nina and the changes in Global Temperature that coincide with them how much they can effect. Without the 2015-2016 El Nino Global Temperature would not have reached a record point.

El Nino caused the record high, just as this La Nina will cause the following low. Once they are over and Global temp stabilizes (to the extent it ever does) then we will know if it will include a step change like 1998 did, or if it will go back to the pause, or even show a step down to pre 2000 temperatures.

By about 2018 we should know. And by 2020 (the next US presidential election) unless we see a SIGNIFICANT increase in Global Temperature (a real one, not just more adjustments) the ‘Climate Change’ movement will be doomed. Even the Liberal/Progressive/Socialist movement may have trouble weathering such an absolute failure.

schitzree
“El Nino caused the record high, just as this La Nina will cause the following low. Once they are over and Global temp stabilizes (to the extent it ever does) then we will know if it will include a step change like 1998 did, or if it will go back to the pause, or even show a step down to pre 2000 temperatures.”

El Nino is no more the cause of a record high than a wave is on record sea level rise. It is just short term noise. And sorry we arn’t going back to pre 2000 temps for quite some time.

Well simon, that really depends on how you’re measuring ‘record high’ temperature. In the grand scheme of things you’re right El Nino is a passing ‘wave’ in the temperature record. That’s why I said we need to wait till it and the following La Nina have passed to see what the actual global temperature is.

It is in fact the Climate Faithful with their ‘warmest year ever’ nonsense that are trying to use the peak of the ‘wave’ to claim a trend that isn’t really there. And it looks pretty silly considering that the wave has already past and global temps are already back to where they were during the ‘pause’.

In about a year or two we will have a better idea where the Global Temperature is. And as for whether we are going back to pre 2000 temps, we’ll see won’t we. I personally only give it about 25% odds. On the gripping hand I only give more moderate warming 15% odds, and ‘catastrophic’ warming (which we’d need to come anywhere near the Climate Faithful’s >2°C this Century predictions) at less the 5%.

With the Faithful having bet all their political capital, their reputations, and even their honor on that catastrophe it isn’t looking good for them.

schitzree
It is in fact the Climate Faithful with their ‘warmest year ever’ nonsense that are trying to use the peak of the ‘wave’ to claim a trend that isn’t really there. And it looks pretty silly considering that the wave has already past and global temps are already back to where they were during the ‘pause’.”

“Then you would have lost that bet.” I don’t think so. If you take out the past El Nino’s as well as the recent one we are hotter than ever.

Can you indicate where you think the data is that supports your statement that if we correct for short term El Nino effects then previous years were hotter? That means you cannot point to 1998 temperatures because they include the short term El Nino effects.

“Here is a logical question that demolishes any notion that El Nino is responsible for warming. If it is, why has this event, that has been happening for (at least) thousands of years, not meant we are hotter than we are?”

Because “warming” is not a permanent state.

Vast amounts of energy are constantly leaving the Earth, departing into the big black deep freeze we call space, never to return. “Warming” is just a temporary reduction in the average rate of energy departure.

“Vast amounts of energy are constantly leaving the Earth, departing into the big black deep freeze we call space, never to return. “Warming” is just a temporary reduction in the average rate of energy departure.”

It’s an answer to your question . . We are not hotter than we are ; ) because “this event” and others like it are just transient irregularities in the departure of the energy from the sun that impacted the earth on it’s way into the big black . .

I think it’s fair to say that there’s been long term warming, upon which this El Nino builds, to create new record highs. So in some sense it’s both. The warming trend of the last 50 years ago most likely includes some level of warming based on GHG emissions, probably in the range of the 1C per doubling that the radiative physics predicts. On top of that there is warming due to ENSO, and the PDO and AMO. So the last El Nino builds on some GHG warming that’s already raised the base to a higher level, which is why we get a higher level El Nino that breaks records. Most skeptics wouldn’t argue this point. Long term, skeptics also predict higher levels of basic warming, just not at the rate alarmists predict. So it’s not inconsistent with the skeptical position for there to be new records made, and warmer and warmer years . But because natural warming and cooling cycles can easily override these trends, even for long periods of time, it’s incorrect to attribute the bulk of the warming in any El NIno to GHG forcing. Even the base warming is often the result of long term natural cycles. And so that base can fall as well. We’ll see, of course.

The world has not been warming for 50 years. It is warmer now than 50 years ago, but the pronounced, more than 30-year postwar cooling trend didn’t end until 1977, when the PDO shifted.

There is however an over 300 year-long warming tend since the depths of the Little Ice Age Cold Period during the Maunder Minimum in the late 17th century, or since the exceptionally frigid winter 1708-09. But human activity has little to do with the natural cycles of centennial-scale warming and cooling.

Simon first argues with the fallacy of aithority as if CO2 warming is a popularity contest. The real question is how do alarmists know recent warming was due to rising CO2. Their belief is based on model results that can not replicate recent warming with their model of natural climate change, and can only simulate rising temperatures by adding heat associated with CO2. The problem is they assume their models have accurately and reliably simulated natural climate change. However those models repeatedly failed to accurately back cast the warming of the 20s to 40s. Their models underestimated the loss of Arctic sea ice and overestimate a loss of Antarctic sea ice. The argument that most scientists believe CO2 is the major contributor to recent warmth, is simply a matter of faith in a hypothesis that has driven failed models.

Simon then provided a great belly laugh saying his “logical question that demolishes any notion that El Nino is responsible for warming. If it is, why has this event, that has been happening for (at least) thousands of years, not meant we are hotter than we are?”

Simon appears clueless that the ocean stores and releases heat on timescales of days to millennia. Its quite silly to suggest the El Nino effect creates endless warming, EN just help release heat that has been stored for decades. The upper 10 feet of the ocean store more heat than the entire atmosphere, and any ocean ventilation raises air temperatures. In addition to EN ventilation the loss if insulating ice cover has allowed heat to ventilate from the Arctic Ocean, driving global averages upward. According to premiere Harvard and MIT oceanographers, heat stored during the warmth of the Holocene Optimum is still ventilating from the deep oceans. http://landscapesandcycles.net/cooling-deep-oceans.html

seaice, you misconstrue my word. El Nino definitely creates large jumps in global temperature. Only an alarmist would deny those facts.

El Ninos are simply phenomena that ventilates heat that was stored at depths in the ocean where it did not affect air temperature. The issue is how much heat has been stored in the oceans and from what time periods. As our top oceanographers will argue, the oceans have yet to come into equilibrium with the atmosphere and heat stored for millennia is still ventilating.

This post – although good news – is suspect. It does not link to a dataset or even state the source. It does not have an end date (I presume it is comparing PARTIAL november data to full months elsewhere – which makes it useless) It has an arbitrary “0” line that ignores the last 18 years of actual data. It does not state an altitude band for these temperatures – and if it is satellite data – it is NOT surface data. I had already shared this on my Facebook Climate page, but I am thinking I should delete it until the data is better.

It’s not good news regardless! The IPCC says warming up to. 1.8C is beneficial globally. No negative effects are proven above that. Crop reserves are at record levels and deserts are greening. Warmth is beautiful!

The headline as so often is misleading. The graph shows TLT over land (cherry-picked), not global. And so is the article. It is cagey about the dataset being talked about. That dataset is RSS V3.3, being phased out. RSS issues it with a warning:“The lower tropospheric (TLT) temperatures have not yet been updated at this time and remain V3.3. The V3.3 TLT data suffer from the same problems with the adjustment for drifting measurement times that led us to update the TMT dataset. V3.3 TLT data should be used with caution.”

And this data shows why. RSS over land dropped by 0.615°C, from 0.735 in Sep to 0.12 in Oct. UAH TLT dropped by just 0.23°C, probably reflecting the extreme cold in Siberia. In actual global, UAH dropped only 0.03°C, to 0.41°C (about the same as last December), and RSS global was 0.35.

RSS V4.0, the proper version, also did not show a spectacular drop, with TMT down from 0.925 to 0.697, It was 0.648 last December.

Well, Janice Moore, that depends on where you measure. Maybe you should download and process UAH’s 2.5° grid data (located in the same directory as the zonal/regional data); you will then get a good feeling.

Here is a chart of so called latitude trends (each point in a line denotes, for the period selected, the linear estimate of one of the 66 latitudes (the stripes 82.5N-90.0N and 82.5S-90.0S have no valid data):
Here you see that, while the troposphere doesn’t warm in the mid latitudes, it does very well above the Arctic (over 4 °C / century at 80.0-82.5N), and, more recently, even above the Antarctic (over 3 °C / century at 80.0-82.5S).

That is incorrect. GHC’s simply absorb and rapidly emit outgoing heat. Warming is due to less than 50% of the heat waves being re-directed back towards earth. There is no blocking or trapping! Only a delay,

“GHC’s simply absorb and rapidly emit outgoing heat.”
No, the heat is absorbed and warms the gas (or keeps it warmer than it would otherwise be). The gas emits according to its temperature. So the temperature remains in balance, but it isn’t necessarily the molecules that absorbed the IR that re-emit it.

The atmosphere thus warmed emits in both directions; the downward stream helps keep us warmer. The main reason why the OLR is reduced is that it is emitted from a layer much colder than the surface. Gas at 230K is part-obscuring a surface at more like 290K.

NIck you implied that I was wrong to state CO2 rapidly absorbs and emits infrared, and then you went off on a tangent to create a facade of expertise.

Based on measurements of fluorescence, the total time for absorption, excitation and emission of a photon takes about one billionth of a second. I am not sure of the exact duration time for CO2 to absorb and then emit a photon but I suspect it is also close to a billionth of a second.

For you to argue CO2 “traps” infrared, for how long are you arguing CO2 traps the heat

“For you to argue CO2 “traps” infrared”
I didn’t say it traps infrared. I said it blocks it. And it does. Photons emitted from the surface are absorbed by GHGs. They don’t exist any more. Their energy does, but now has to be re-radiated from a much cooler source gas.

You can see the effect very well in these spectra from Grant Petty’s book, taken over an Alaska icefield. Looking down, you very clearly see the bite out of the spectrum between about 600 and 750 cm⁻¹. You can see how, at about 900 cm⁻¹ (atmospheric window), the IR comes from the 273K surface. But in the bite region, the rays were blocked by CO2 and re-emitted at about 225K, with far less heat transported.

When CO2 absorbs a photon, the energy is transferred to other gas molecules generally before it can be re-emitted. That is the basis of local thermodynamic equilibrium – temperature is diffused fast enough by collision that the molecules can be said to have equal temperature (and so the gas has a temperature). This fails in the very high atmosphere.

jim steele November 28, 2016 at 8:57 pm
Based on measurements of fluorescence, the total time for absorption, excitation and emission of a photon takes about one billionth of a second. I am not sure of the exact duration time for CO2 to absorb and then emit a photon but I suspect it is also close to a billionth of a second.

For CO2 in the 15 micron band the mean emission time is of the order of millisec, whereas in the lower troposphere the mean time between collisions is ~0.1 nanosecs so most of the absorbed energy is shared with surrounding gas molecules, not emitted.

Indeed high collisions rates in the lower troposphere will result in a sharing of kinetic energy that was gained from infrared absorption by CO2. If we limit our analysis there, we could argue CO2 blocks heat from escaping. But the bigger picture also reveals CO2 facilitates cooling of the troposphere.

O2 and N2 make up 99% of the atmosphere and those molecules do not absorb or emit infrared, so those molecules can not lose kinetic energy and cool radiatively. However they can transfer energy to CO2 via collisions after which CO2 emits infrared and facilitates atmospheric cooling. Roughly speaking we can say CO2 facilitates warming in the denser lower atmosphere and facilitates cooling in the upper atmosphere.

Convection dominates heat transfer from the earth’s surface and rapidly transfers that heat to the upper troposphere. CO2 does not block this mass transport of heat. If the atmosphere only consisted of N2 and O2, their heat that was gained from collisions with the warm earth’s surface could not radiate back to space. However collisions with CO2 transfers that energy, which then CO2 quickly emits as infrared allowing the heat to radiate away.

From that perspective, to say simplistically argue CO2 blocks heat is very deceptive.

“AGW theory simply says that GHGs will block outgoing heat. The Earth as a whole will warm. As to how that is distributed, that is a matter for meteorology. Land temperatures change more easily.”

Physics shows that water prevents GHG’s from penetrating the surface and hugely only allows solar energy through. Therefore the influence GHG’s has on land compared to the ocean is significantly different and much reduced with water. Not only that, but latent heat adds another feature to increase the difference even further with evaporation. Block is not correct as slowing down slightly is far more accurate.

Increased evaporation cools the surface over water whereas over land more precipitation is needed to do a similar thing. Land temperatures change more easily because the energy is only allowed through via conduction once in contact with the surface. Therefore below the ground has little influence on the surface and removes a mechanism that hugely influences water regardless of GHG’s.

Land therefore hugely only responds to above the surface in the atmosphere and shows the affect on GHG’s by far on the planets surface. Land temperatures therefore are easily the best control to confirm how the change in GHG’s is affecting them or not. Hence, using land temperatures is not cherry picking when there is a good scientific reason for this in helping distinguishing science conjecture.

How that is distributed is by radiation, convection and conduction. Where meteorology is only part of the huge ocean cycles that acquire there energy from the sun.

“So it won’t be used to show a Global “warmest evah”.. will it Nick.”
I doubt that anyone, WUWT or elsewhere, ever quoted RSS TLT land only before Rose cherry-picked it for this occasion. Or ever will again.

“Honestly, Andy, look back at that last exchange and imagine how it would read to someone new here. Nick is making sensible and on-topic points, all Andy does is taunt.”

I really don’t think he understands just how obvious the contrast between his conduct and Nick’s conduct stands out. Nick talks about the science, and provides evidence to support his position. Andy sneers and whines like a school kid with a bad attitude.

RSS says the dataset has problems with drifting measurement times and should be used with caution. That does mean that a sudden drop of 0.6 degrees not reflected in other datasets should be viewed with scepticism. But some sceptics believe anything that confirms their belief.

Looked like it wasn’t a big difference between the versions. Maybe 0.02 degrees. So, its just an alarmist deflection imo. Anyway, the REAL global data for Nov. comes out in a couple days. We’ll then see if this land cooling went global or not.

“Looked like it wasn’t a big difference between the versions. Maybe 0.02 degrees. “
Well, one big difference is that RSS V4.0 doesn’t have a TLT. But its TMT land only anomaly was 0.558°C. That’s a lot different from 0.12°C.

Where did David Rose get his data from: Did he download it himself or did he rely on an undisclosed scientist for this information? Very suspicious?

Nick doesn’t tell us how he knows where David Rose got his data. So far there is no reason to believe Nick is right either.

November isn’t complete yet, so the last data point should be from October. UAH’s global temperature (TLT) dropped 0.5 degC from the peak in February 2016 to June 2016 and has remained fairly constant since then. It is still roughly at least 0.2 degC above the average since 2000. In other words, it looks nothing like this graph.

This is supposed to be a skeptical science blog, so let’s be skeptical and scientific about what we read and POST here. Otherwise we are no different from the religious zealots on the other side. Climate change implies a change in 30-year or longer averages, so nothing that happens in one month, or one year means “game over”.

The RSS V3.3 (use with caution) land only TLT data is here. Rose’s graph is poor, but seems to match the numbers. But yes, I think it is extraordinary that he would write such a report without giving the source. Or that anyone would pay attention to it.

I have been saying the same for weeks now, based around seat-of-the-pants observations and reports from the New Zealand farming community. It is based around grass growth, production, and natural responses to spring.

New Zealand dairy production is down 10% across the country – in my province 14%. Deciduous trees were 3 weeks late breaking into leaf. Silage and vegetable crops are late by a similar period. The spring was too cool and wet with little sun to lift soil temperatures.

One old timer, who is an agricultural contractor and keeps weather records, says that the last time this happened was in the 70’s which correlates with the 1972-73 El Nino. Our records were sketchy back then but according to my personal observations this was a more powerful event then both 1998 and 2015. Farmers do not forget as we have a range of proxies that directly hit our pockets and personal stress.

New Zealand is a range of mountains in the sea with a lot of wind. This is not just a land phenomenon. If I had to bet one way or the other I would back a very cool 2017.

Michael Carter
As a fellow NZer the feedback from rural farmers is the real data. You will also note that the westerly / north westerly winds normally experiencing a peak during October and November mainly over the South Island (Te Waipounamu) have been mostly absent this year, and only even now showing no real sign of endurance. These winds are absent primarily because the greater percentage of the NH summer atmospheric volume went north into the Arctic region causing warming and ice breakup. Exactly the same NH / SH atmospheric transport bias pattern occured in 2016 as in 2012, the year of the greatest ice loss.

Yes, and the term La Nina is being used by media. The Metservice is predicting a “cloudy, humid summer’ for the northern Nth Island. What they did not say was ‘cooler’ but I am prepared to bet that it will be. Still darn cold here in Waikato and its nearly December!

Michael
You will be happy to know that NASA Climate division is sending up a satellite to locate the Southern Hemisphere. If successful, they will dispatch a team to cut down one of your trees in an attempt to verify your your direct observation.

Same pattern to the west of NZ in southern. Australia
Second wettest winter on record
Central Victoria latitude 37 south rainfall for 11 months of 2016 with one month to go now at 48 inches versus
24 for whole of 2015
Very late cool spring only one day over 30c
Sounds like La Nina to us

NorCal SITREP – La Nina is full on. This is a “wet” La Nina, meaning, the line between the “wet PacNW” and “dry SW US” that is typical of La Nina, is actually well down into California. The line is going to be just south of the Bay Area for most systems. This will give NorCal a normal to above normal water year, So Cal will continue in drought. In addition, we will see several low elevation snow events, and, in all likelihood, at least one bad freeze that will remind everyone we are in the mid latitudes.

You know I wonder if that’s not one of the causes of this daft movement, the weather just doesn’t do much, and they think it’s like that everywhere. In Ohio we can get all 4 seasons in a 36 hour period, and no one here is really surprised lol

With the big very cold blob stretching across mid latitudes in the N Pacific and even more cold water in the South Pacific, the ENSO all by itself is less definitive as a cooling mechanism. Even if ENSO doesn’t go much below its present level, a major cooling would appear to be in the offing. I don’t think the record drop in temperature was due to just the ENSO band at the equator. Has anyone considered using what we know about ENSO water temperatures and world temperature and adding on exceptional effects like the cold blobs and general cooler oceans.

Heat flows from warm to cool. The areas that were anomalously warm have now cooled and the hotter areas are on their way out of the system.

So a cooling climate system is the way to bet.

Meanwhile, the sun will be warming the tropical Pacific with less intensity in coming years than it did during the natural late-20th century warming cycle, so it will be a long time before another super El Nino such as in 1998 and 2016.

It would seem to me that there has to be periods where the main reservoirs of stored heat in the ocean get over turned back to the surface to cool.
Where I live, the difference between warm air from the gulf to air from canada, is 10 or 15 F in water vapor. It’s going to get cold a lot of places if it has all cooled off.

As always, the EN blew off a lot of accumulated heat from the ocean into the air, spiking land temperatures. It will now take years of more sunshine on the tropical Pacific and normal wind patterns to pile up more warm water in the western Pacific, until the winds weaken and the water flows back toward the Americas. Then the deeper cold water will well up with the following LN.

It’s a natural cycle of greater or lesser strength (strong in 1998 and 2016), driven by the sun and oceanic circulation. Man-made GHGs, not so much.

The Pause that refreshes will soon be back on track, unless the cooler sun causes a worrisome decline in the beneficial warmth we’ve enjoyed since the Great PDO Flip of 1977.

..When you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything you want ! As an American living in Canada, I really hope the “Alarmist” are right…I would find it extremely difficult to live under 3 miles of ice !

So true. The Peak Oilers, the Ozone Holers, even the Population Bombers, NONE of them have ever admitted that their beautiful theories and predictions were wrong. Like failed prophets they just move the date of their apocalypse back a few more years.

Ray – Do you really believe that we can calculate mean temperatures prior to 1960 within 1 C?. NO ONE has openly defended this calculation with rational logical statistical analysis. Why? – because they can’t. We are not all suckers. Just think about it for a while. One only needs some common sense. It MAY have been 1 – 2 C colder during this early period. We cant know

Isn’t this damn-near exactly what was predicted by anyone with an ounce of awareness of el Nino? I’m a total layman member of the public but even I now know what goes El Nino up will also come La Nina down. The pause may well make a return appearance next year. Welcome back, ol’ buddy!

You are right Cheshire the el Nino is a blip in our climate, to my mind the recent warming was caused by the heating of the oceans by a few rampant solar cycles. The cycle we are having at the moment is weak but the ocean is a good heat bank to keep us warm. The sun also has long term holidays and is now at the start of its holiday period and the next two cycles are likely to be very wimpish and the oceans will cool.The last time it happened was the little ice age, where the Thames river froze. I am old and it will not bother me but over the next hundred years it is going to get bloody cold in Europe and Northern America. These cycles are like clock work and we are due.

Look, I’d be as delighted as anyone to see the CAGW hypothesis finally put to bed but I fear Nick Stokes and Toneb are right on this one. The data used is definitely iffy and, aside from that, David Rose’s conclusions rely on some pretty blatant cherry picking.

FWIW, I think it’s more than possible that CO2 warming (+ feedbacks) won’t be as dramatic as most of the models suggest, but it looks pretty nailed on that we’ll see a continuation of the current modest warming trend.

what is missing in this thread,is the complete absence of awareness, that despite the awesome warm forcing power of a trace gas CO2 failing to keep the continental cooling from happening,it can’t even prevent all that suddenly elusive energy from leaving the continents to outer space so quickly in recent months.

Gee how does CO2 do that? be so selective on where to “trap” and where to ignore the outgoing heat leaving by the truckload.

“Readers may recall this quote from Dr. Phil Jones of CRU, by the BBC:

Q: Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming{?}

A: Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods. …

By AJStrata at StrataSphere: CRU Raw Temp Data Shows No Significant Warming Over Most of the World

‘Bottom Line – Using two back-of-the-envelope tests for significance against the CRU global temperature data I have discovered: 75% of the globe has not seen significant peak warming or cooling changes between the period prior to 1960 and the 2000′s which rise above a 0.5°C threshold, which is well within the CRU’s own stated measurement uncertainties o +/- 1°C or worse. Assuming a peak to peak change (pre 1960 vs 2000′s) should represent a change greater than 20% of the measured temperature range (i.e., if the measured temp range is 10° then a peak-to-peak change of greater than 2° would be considered ‘significant’) 87% the Earth has not experienced significant temperature changes between pre 1960 period and the 2000′s.

… testing a hypothesis I have regarding the raw temp data vs the overly processed CRU, GISS, NCDC, IPCC results (the processed data shows dramatic global warming in the last century). I have been of the opinion the raw temp data tells a different, cooler story than the processed data. … To pull th[eir] deception off on a global scale, as I have mentioned before, requires the alarmists to deal with two inconvenient truths:

— The warm periods in the 1930′s and 1940′s which were about the same as today
— The current decline in temperature, just when the alarmists require a dramatic increase to match the rising CO2 levels.

… People have found actual CRU code that does this, and it does it by smearing good temp data with inaccurate proxy data (in this case, the tree rings) or hard coded adjustments. The second method used by alarmists is to just drop those inconvenient current temps showing global cooling, which has also been clearly discovered in the CRU data dump. …

In my original post on these files, I went into great detail on the aspect of measurement accuracy (or error bars) regarding alarmists claims. I will not repeat that information here, but I feel I am being generous giving the data a +/- 0.5°C margin of error on a trend line (which contains multiple layers of averaging error incorporated in it). … What that really means is detecting a global warming increment of 0.8Â°C is not statistically possible. …’ — h/t to Joe D’Aleo”

If this comment is intended for me then you are showing me stuff with which I’m fully familiar.

I know what Phil Jones said and I know that “our side” jumped on it but I fear it’s not a supportive as we might suppose. Jones is clearly not an accomplished statistician.

Statistical significance is an arbitrary threshold. Conventionally, statisticians use a 95% confidence interval – but less/more stringent intervals such as 90% or 99% could be used. While it was true that for the 1995-2009 period the ZERO trend did fall inside the 95% CI envelope, it was far more probable that there was a warming trend than not.

The big question is, “how do you think it is likely to play out?” Will it gently freeze over the surface, insulating the arctic water, likely leading to large melt in the summer? Or, will it be choppy, keeping the water exposed and causing thick build up of ice and heating of the atmosphere and cooling the ocean?

It will also be interesting to see how exposed arctic and if ice mass growth affect CO2 concentration. NH late fall, increase uptake, delay release. Arctic continuing uptake. Siberia buried in snow and ice.

Authors and commenters may want to modify the notation “Dr. Gavin Schmidt, head of
Nasa’s climate division” to the descriptive phrasing, “Dr. Gavin Schmidt, the CURRENT
head of Nasa’s climate division.

This change in phraseology promotes accuracy without making overt political
innuendos.

Look here at the strange temp config vis the Arctic and Siberia.
Both of the order of 20C anomalous to their average.
The NH Pole of Cold shifted entirely from a SEA basin (Arctic ocean) to LAND (Siberia Russia)

Interesting. The massive ‘hot spot’off the north tip of Greenland is almost perfectly centered over the Gakkel Ridge – a well-known center of sea floor spreading, recent lava flows, and the northernmost extension of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. We don’t have active monitoring of geological activity in this area, but perhaps we should since large-scale heat releases there could significantly affect the Arctic ice thickness.

“What I see is a huge amount of water dumping huge amounts of energy into a very cold space.”

What unscientific nonsense.
The water (Arctic) is mostly ice covered for a start.
Secondly the “huge amount of energy, is, I assume you mean, warm(er) air.
SO how can warm air “dump” it’s warmth onto a different region and make it colder?

For UAH: There is no statistically significant warming since August 1993: Cl from -0.006 to 1.810. (This is using version 6.0 according to Nick’s program.)

The UAH average anomaly so far for 2016 is 0.566. This would set a record if it stayed this way. 1998 was the warmest at 0.484. Prior to 2016, the highest ever monthly anomaly was in April of 1998 when it reached 0.743. The average anomaly in 2015 was 0.261 and it was ranked 3rd.

RSS

For RSS: There is no statistically significant warming since December 1993: Cl from -0.008 to 1.746.
The RSS average anomaly so far for 2016 is 0.645. This would set a record if it stayed this way. 1998 was the warmest at 0.550. Prior to 2016, the highest ever monthly anomaly was in April of 1998 when it reached 0.857. The average anomaly in 2015 was 0.358 and it was ranked 3rd.

***

Hadsst3

For Hadsst3: There is no statistically significant warming since December 1996: Cl from -0.022 to 2.162.
The Hadsst3 average anomaly so far for 2016 is 0.651. This would set a record if it stayed this way. Prior to 2016, the highest ever monthly anomaly was in September of 2015 when it reached 0.725. The average anomaly in 2015 was 0.592 and this set a new record.

GISS

For GISS: The warming is significant for all periods above three years.
The GISS average anomaly so far for 2016 is 1.05. This would set a record if it stayed this way. Prior to 2016, the highest ever monthly anomaly was in December of 2015 when it reached 1.10. The average anomaly in 2015 was 0.86 and it set a new record.

Conclusion

It would appear that when considering ENSO numbers and the length of time they were high, that 2016 would be significantly higher than 1998. {i.e., the warming of 2016 is COMPLETELY WITHIN THE BOUNDS OF NATURAL VARIATION}… .

Janice, I think the request for data refers to the “stunning new data”. Nothing you posted shows the NASA satellite data showing a 1C drop in the last few months.

Several people have asked about the source of the data, and as far as I can see, no one can point to the original data. Every time I try googling this, I just get links to the same article with no indication of what satellite it is, or what part of the atmosphere is being measured, or what the date is for the final data data point in the graph.

If you have links the THAT data, I am sure people will want to see it.

Tim Folkerts November 28, 2016 at 2:20 pm
Janice, I think the request for data refers to the “stunning new data”. Nothing you posted shows the NASA satellite data showing a 1C drop in the last few months.

Several people have asked about the source of the data, and as far as I can see, no one can point to the original data. Every time I try googling this, I just get links to the same article with no indication of what satellite it is, or what part of the atmosphere is being measured, or what the date is for the final data data point in the graph.

If you have links the THAT data, I am sure people will want to see it.

Your verbal slithering will not change the fact that, given an accurate and meaningful definition of “Mission accomplished,” President George W. Bush was right to say that aboard that ship.

The same with the fact that the AGW battle is OVER. CO2 UP. WARMING STOPPED.

That there are deluded troops hiding out on the frontiers of the theater of war (some of whom are named McLeod) , still firing off pot shots, ready to return should we on the side of science relax our vigilance, changes that not a wit.

Just curious — where did “Nasa” (in the above article) come from?” In Hebrew, “nasa” means “to lift up, take up, carry.” That’s very cool (that NASA’s purpose and nasa’s meaning coincide), but, I’ve never seen NASA called “Nasa” in any official documents. Anyone have the answer to this mystery?

Just British useage, no doubt. In American useage, we leave off the “the” of most acronyms, e.g., “I’m flying into JFK.”** (not: “I’m flying into the JFK.”) Like (I think, lol) a U.K. resident would say, “I’m flying into Heathrow.” (not: “I’m flying into the Heathrow.”)

**JFK = {The} John F. Kennedy {Airport}

I get that we sometimes use English differently, e.g., British: “He is in hospital.” American: “He is in the hospital.” I’m just wondering if it is, indeed, British useage here or just the writer’s mistake when I read “the NOAA.”

Well, while Americans use “hospice” {dying patient care} the way the British use “hospital” (“He’s in hospice.”), Americans don’t have the concept of “hospital” as a state of care, just a building. “In hospital” just sounds nonsensical. Weird (of us), huh? :)

“Church,” on the other hand, is like the British “hospital:”

“She is going to church,” (going to attend a worship service in a church building); and

“She is in the church.”

*******************************************

So — what about “the NOAA”?…. I’ve seen it more than once…. but, perhaps it is just a common typo?

Say it out loud, but instead of reading the acronym as a noun (I’m way over my head here), say what the initials stand for.
I think that answers your question, but then creates a new one you had never thought about before :)

Thanks, Mike! Yes, that was my guess. The British are thinking, every time, “N” “O” “A” “H,” thus, they put a “the” in front. And, as you said I wish someone British would answer the Q, why they do that? Not that there need be a “reason,” but, given that they would have heard of it first from Americans who always say just plain, “noah,” why change it?

I wonder if they EVER leave the “the” off ANY acronym? Kinda defeats the purpose of an “acronym” to put a “the” before it and always enunciate every single letter of the acronym.

Aaa. Who cares? lol They pronounce French and Spanish words such as valet and taco in their own British way. And wigwam. Vive la difference! Go, British! AND, GO, BREXIT!

Yes, AndyG, and when “Chimp” uses her or his real name, we will know it.

I think the chimp is really a snake in a cheap wig and an overcoat. The snake’s grossly inaccurate statements don’t fool most WUWTers, but, just in case one of the AGW Cult Members is reading WUWT, the snake comes here to keep their minds enslaved by the Cult of Sustainability and AGW’s junk science teachings.

If this is “land only” satellite temperature this is going to be misleading. There is more land in the NH than in the SH and there has been a rather huge cold anomaly as the polar air mass slipped down over Siberia during November. This might be more “weather” than “climate”.

No, because this is “anomaly” not “absolute” temperature. If the polar vortex had not moved out of the Arctic ocean away from the pole, we would not see such a drop in land area temperatures (because the polar air mass, being over the Arctic Ocean would not be included as “land”).

Thank you crosspatch, the graph in the article makes sense to me now with your explanation. It captures the negative anomalies in Asia from the displacement of the Polar Air mass without capturing the positive anomalies left in it’s wake in the Arctic Ocean.

Brian — the “pause” cannot be said with any meaningful degree of confidence to be “defunct.” Rejoice! Not RIP but, “we must wait a few years and see” — what the data turns out to be. That is, an El Nino blip on the temperature plateau is not an end to warmING. It is only a temporary rise in temps.. The TREND is still flat.

The 2015-16 El Nino was probably the strongest since accurate measurements began, with the water up to 3C warmer than usual.

It has now been replaced by a La Nina event – when the water in the same Pacific region turns colder than normal.

The starting point of proving the AGW theory should be to explain how atmospheric CO2 can warm the oceans by 3°C, and then cool the oceans by 3° or more. There is 3,000x more heat in the oceans than the atmosphere, and CO2 is predicted to only be able to warm the atmosphere by 1.6°C. The numbers simply aren’t there. CO2 simply doesn’t trap enough energy to warm the oceans, let alone the atmpshere.

Did you ever compare satellite data with the IGRA radiosonde dataset, or even with its most homogenised variant called “RATPAC B monthly combined” ?

I guess that if you ever had like I did, you wouldn’t have presented Spencer’s chart.

Feel free to post that analysis. It would be welcome, and while you are at it, please explain how 13µ to 18µ can warm the oceans. That would be a good starting point because if you can’t explain how atmospheric CO2 can warm the oceans, you can’t explain why the atmosphere is warming.

and while you are at it, please explain how 13µ to 18µ can warm the oceans.

Sorry: I’m not interested here in any CO2 discussion.

There is enough to do with the question why even UAH6.0beta5 shows, for the “pause” period 2000-2013, a linear trend of over 4 °C / century in the latitude stripe 80-82.5N, and of over 3 °C / century in the stripe 80-82.5S:

” if you can’t explain how atmospheric CO2 can warm the oceans, you can’t explain why the atmosphere is warming.”

The absorption of the infrared emission from atmospheric greenhouse gases reduces the gradient through the skin layer, the flow of heat from the ocean beneath will be reduced, leaving more of the heat introduced into the bulk of the upper oceanic layer by the absorption of sunlight to remain there to increase water temperature.
That is we are talking NOT about the gradient between sea surface and overlying air, but we are talking about the gradient THROUGH THE SKIN – i.e., the water temperature difference between the top and bottom of the skin layer, which controls how heat flows across this layer, from the bulk of ocean water below to the surface. Obviously, if you heat the top of the skin layer, this reduces the heat flow across this layer from below

Note: the above really only applies fully to calm water.
Turbulent motion (just look at the average sea surface) dominates and of course any warming of the skin layer will get mixed down.

The null hypothesis is that nothing unusual is happening in earth’s climate, requiring a special explanation.

There is zero evidence that anything unusual is happening, let alone catastrophic man-made global warming due to anthropogenic GHGs.

Thus the null hypothesis cannot be rejected. Hence, no worries.

What is in evidence however is the salubrious effect on life on our planet of one more molecule of CO2 (up from three to four) per 10,000 dry air molecules over the past 250 years or so, since the onset of the Industrial Revolution.

Not only based on the classical cherry-picking, but without any references to any source (like some other commenters, I know where it comes from).

It is ridiculous, yet misleading and thoroughly unscientific to hide here the use of land data (RSS3.3 TLT‘s northern mid latitude zone) where it shows by accident exactly what one wants to pretend, namely an anomaly drop from 1.323 °C in February 2016 down to 0.385 °C in October!

I guess David Rose would never tell you that RSS3.3 TLT‘s zonal trend for the northern mid latitudes from 1979 till today is… 0.213 °C / decade, i.e. about twice as much as for the entire Globe.

In comparison to such poor work, Werner Brozek’s posts look quite a bit more professional, even if he often confounds ENSO signals and tropospheric anomalies, and above all thoroughly misunderstands the concept of statistically significant warming.

The 2015/16 ENSO edition was by no means stronger than that of 1997/98. The latter has been the real Super El Niño, even stronger than the 1877/78 and the 1982/83 editions.

a) Look at this graph comparing the 3 most recent editions

b) Here is my usual cherry-picking answer, showing how much stronger the troposphere reacted to the 1997/98 ENSO signal in the Tropics than elsewhere in the Globe (here using UAH data):
(RSS3.3 TLT and RSS4.0 TTT show the same behavior).

Bindidon November 28, 2016 at 4:00 pm “What a desperately superficial guest post!”
The pain, the agony you must be feeling.
3 desperately superficial replies with nary a hint of warmist bile.
Better get used to it.
There are more falls to come.
marty November 28, 2016 at 4:53 pm “I propose to wait these few days until the November data are there!”
Very wise.
But miss the chance to celebrate?
The anticipated drops in temp may take until January to fully kick in but we can hope.
I remember a blog a few years ago saying the temp for the year was set by the temp in the first 3 months more or less. So a hot 2016 still but hopefully a very cold 2017 when of course it will all be a La Nina event [JCH] though this was all a AGW event.

The GISS land-only data shows higher temperatures in the past and lower temperatures in the present than those shown by the GHCN station data they rely on, and which GISS processes further in order to eliminate outliers, weaken the data of rural stations with higher nightlight down to their real rural context, etc.

And above all: why do you speak about “GISS flattening” but not about UAH and RSS showing the same for the Globe, but NOT in the Tropics, as you can see in the chart above comparing UAH “Globe” with UAH “Tropics Ocean” ?

What about you comparing UAH Tropics data with GISS’ data in the same region?

Yes. Both auditory and optic signals pass through the center of the brain before being routed to the auditory and visual cortices. The brain center contains a semi-autonomous protective core that can make independent decisions as to what is seen or heard.

I can’t find a single source that shows a TLT drop anywhere close to that claimed in the cited article. Can someone point to a possible source for this? One possibility that occurs to me is based on the “surface” and “over land” phrase, which would exclude the exceptionally high temperatures in the Arctic, while including the cold blast that slid down into Siberia, and skew the global temperature set. This raises the question of intentional misrepresentation.

It is v3.3; v4.0 is out now, but they haven’t yet released TLT. Of V3.3, the people who create it, RSS, say:“The lower tropospheric (TLT) temperatures have not yet been updated at this time and remain V3.3. The V3.3 TLT data suffer from the same problems with the adjustment for drifting measurement times that led us to update the TMT dataset. V3.3 TLT data should be used with caution.”

The old revision 3.3 is still accessible for the TLT level; but there is no RSS 4.0 TLT available.

The interesting fact here is that in his Senate Testimony presented 2006 Feb 2, John Christy (UAH) carefully avoided to present any TLT data. All UAH data referred to in this document solely concerns TMT (mid troposphere).

You really have no idea, how about-face this is, do you?
You have one satellite with different “algorithms” working on the AMSU sensors to come up with a Global average surface mean temp.
Never mind that it’s over a layer in the troposphere.
That we are now on V6 (Beta5) of UAH and V4.0 of RSS doesn’t tell you something about, err….
“FABRICATED …. mess”?
And to boot – go look at the disjoint where the 14 MSU ends and the 15 AMSU sensor starts versus RATPAC sonde data.
One sat sensor vs 10’s thousands of surface thermos.
UAH are just assuming that the newer AMSU is of “”Cadillac”-quality calibration”.
Whilst RSS admit they do not know which sat sensor is/was wrong and have smoothed out the difference!!
Homogenisation of the surface thermo record (apples and apples) can be found in documentation and which even when discounted makes not a whit of difference in the outcome.
The only reason UAH is the fave is because it’s the coldest.
RSS was and now Mears has said that it should not be treated a better than the surface obs and V4.0 has made it warmer, you have relegated that.

Oh, and I guess you don’t like climate models either?
That the algorithms use them when working out when the time of max/min temp should be when they sample a surface outside of that time and plug that is as the value, no doubt make perfect sense to you. Does it?
And does and weather observer read the max/min at the wrong time and then proceed to check what the NWP model had for them and record them as fact??

“RSS uses the diurnal cycle from a climate model (CCM3), with empirical adjustments. We (UAH) use a pure empirical adjustment based of the the observed drift between NOAA-18 and NOAA-19 (for the “1:30” satellites) and NOAA-15 and Aqua (for the “7:30” satellites).”

Re the misaligned MSU/AMSU sensors used by the sat dat series.
What if all the mercury thermos around the world were replaced by ERT’s.
Then we notice a difference.
The new ERT’s are reading colder.
Wot to do.
Go with the new coz it’s, err, new.
Or split the difference?
In one case we end up with a possible wrong answer (50/50).
In the other we end up with a deffo wrong answer.

Toneb–you have perhaps seen the coverage map for surface stations? Notice how warm many of the “infills” are? When there is a great deal of “warming” in areas with no actual thermometers, perhaps something is going on? The satellites at least do not have the infill problem.

You might have a point, if all of the published temperature series weren’t half made up data, and the rest is homogenized, and that’s ignoring all of the retro adjustments to the data.
When you remove all of this junk, the temp series looks a lot like the satellite.

“When you remove all of this junk, the temp series looks a lot like the satellite.”
The people who say that never do it. I have, and it makes very little difference. And when you say “like the satellite”, the question is, which satellite?. As I posted above, you can have UAH 6 trends differing from GISS, when V5.6 trend was very similar.

But they still should be very correlated. The 0.12 reading is the 3rd lowest since 2013, and those other months were at or below Pause average globally. So, I would guess that UAH will catch up to RSS this month. Its hard to say this record plunge means nothing. But we’ll see in a few days when UAH comes out.. .,

This drop is just about wnat I expected. It is a consequence of the twenty-first century temperature variations which started with the appearance of a step warming in 1999. No one understood it and they paid no attention to my analysis of it. This step warming followed immediately upon the departure of the super El Nino of 1998 and very likely is comprised of the warm water the super it left behind. In three years this raised global temperature by 0.3 degrees Celsius and then stopped. As a consequence, all twenty-first century temperatures were higher than the the eighties and nineties had been before the appearance of that super El Vino .The hiatus of the early twenty-first century rested upon the raised top of this temperature platform.This general temperature rise led to numerous “warmer than ever” peak temperature claims. Hansen was quick to notice that nine out of ten “highest ever” temperatures congregated in the first decade of the twenty-first century and quickly claimed them all for greenhouse warming. This is impossible because according to the Keeling curve no carbon dioxide was released when the step warming took place. If this warming really was fueled by warm water left behind by the super El Nino of 1998 then no replenishment is possible and we should observe a steady decline of temperature after the initial spurt of warming. Judging by the latest UAH temperature release the cooling already has started. It is not easy to see because it is confounded by the La Nina of 2008, the El Nino of 2010, and the present El Nino of 2016 that all have to be crossed. The cooling is visible as a downslope from 2002 to 2012, beyond which the 2016 El Nino takes over. But by extrapolating that downslope ahead of the El Nino of 2016 the temperature beyond it should drop quite low, just as the present surprise observation shows. It may eventually drop to the level of the eighties and nineties that served as a base upon which the step warming of 1999 was built up. And while on the subject, eighties and nineties had no warming and were a hiatus period of 18 years. The crooks running the global temperature archive wiped it out and substituted a phony warming in its place.

In all of this ‘hottest year ever’ discussion, don’t forget the 1915 to 1945 warm period where NOAA/NASA substantially reduced temp data for this period and added temp for 2000+ to artificially make the later temps appear warmer. Take a look at Hansen’s curve prior to the chilling of the 1930/40’s and Chen’s (2011) non-homogenized temps for the U.S. Hansen’s 2001 curve shows at least 5 years in the 1920s and 1930s that are warmer than 1998 and 2 warmer than 2015. Chen’s ‘de-homogenized’ curve shows 5 years warmer than 2015.

“…for the U.S…” is the operative phrase here. You are looking at data set that represents less than 2% of the Earth’s surface; extrapolating that to the entire globe has no validity

Admitting to Hansen’s data manipulation of his GISS record is not your friend: “False in one, False in all.”
What actually does have validity in real science is CO2-Climate Change’s Global Record of [100%] Prediction Failure = Scientific Falsification.

“What actually does have validity in real science is CO2-Climate Change’s Global Record of [100%] Prediction Failure = Scientific Falsification.”

Yes, of course it has – that’s plain to see.
If you meant the consequences of the above.
I know of none that would be obvious for some decades.
But maybe you have a time-machine – so I bow to your clairvoyance.

What is the correlation coefficient between US and Global Temperatures since 1880?

Interesting question! But I’ll have to answer it on the base of GHCN station data, as I lack regional GISS datasets. I’ll consult data ar home. But one detail I can write right now: CONUS is wrt temperature an incredibly more stable landscape as is the whole Globe :-)

Unfortunately it stops in 1987, and so doesn’t show the rest. But you can compare its end with the beginning of Klaus Wolters’ extended Multivariate ENSO index

So indeed at a first glance, ENSO seems to drive everything.

But if it does: why is then the 1997/98 El Niño weaker represented by all global surface and satellite records than is the 2015/16 edition?

Look at the comparison between 1997/98 and 2015/16 using five different ENSO indices:
Following the higher ENSO power of the 1997/98 edition, should not all temperature measurements have shown this in their records? Why did they all not?

The only exception: satellite data restricted to the Tropics latitude band (25S-25N)…

“But if it does: why is then the 1997/98 El Niño weaker represented by all global surface and satellite records than is the 2015/16 edition?”

Really quite simple. The AMO induced loss of sea ice in the Arctic has driven up the global temperature a bit more in 15/16 than was the case in 97/98. This is clear when you look at the February anomaly vs. the June anomaly. The biggest effect of open water heating in the Arctic takes place in the NH winter.

There was a series of super El Ninos in the 1980s and ’90s, so more heat was blown off. There was no super EN between 1998 and 2016 supers, and a lower than average number of normal ENs, so more heat had accumulated in the tropical Pacific to be released this year.

2. Chimps idea of the 2016 UAH heat spike being boosted by a lack of recent Niño events since 1998 is a nice try, but makes no sense because
— the argument is of no use for UAH Tropics (the 1998 peak is there higher than that of 2016);
— there were indeed more Niño events before 1998, but two of them were heavily masked by volcanic eruptions (St Helens + El Chichon; Pinatubo).

Bindidon, the AMO peaked around 2010. It just went positive in 1995. Your claim is utter nonsense and shows a complete lack of climate knowledge. Also, the AMO always seems to get a little boost during El Nino years which is what you showed. If you can’t even look at the simple stuff and get it right why do you think you can possibly understand the bigger complexities?

Dr:
I’m sure you will agree that an EN heats the atmosphere by bringing warmer waters to the surface.
I’m also sure you will agree that it cannot heat the air without that water cooling.
SO:
“All ENSO since 1960”, eh?

In that case either the OHC should have gone down since then, or the Sun would have to be providing the energy to both heat the oceans and allow them the disgorge some of that heat periodically to heat the atmosphere. Progressively.
Please explain why also that this last EN (just for instance), although weaker than the 97/98 one managed to make the atmosphere hotter than 18 years ago.

So even La Ninas come in a warmer and warmer variety as time progresses…

Consider an El Nino as putting a pot of water on to boil, it’s all the water vapor they generate that then blows down wind to cool. That is why they generate warming. Thought the 97 El Nino left a change in the 20 to 35 North Latitudes where the sensitivity to solar went up and never came back down.

Well, now that the science is settled, perhaps someone can explain what causes El Nino and what make makes El Nino go away and what makes El Nino reappear and what makes it go away again, and ……..
Clearly, since the climate can be predicted 100 years hence then it should be a CO2 laden breeze to provide the answer to this question.

I cannot answer Styopa, because reasons are not clear — but I have asked David Rose on Twitter to let us know which actual articles he was referring to. If/once he lets us know that the Yan et al study was indeed that noted by Nick and others and posted above, then we might ask “why was this link or cite omitted from the Daily Mail story?”

It ,may seem odd or sloppy journalism to not give any clear reference to the Yan et al piece –, but maybe there is a perfectly sensible explanation. I will post David Rose’s answer should he get around to answering my query.

It is not strange if siberian freezing show up in global land temperature. But I don`t like to be fooled by “stupid sensationalism” from either side. I always like to know where data can be found, and what kind of knowledge data can give.

The graph that this article is based on appears to be made up, and bears no relationship to the truth. It is attributed to NASA but no URL is provided. The findings it reports are completely different to those reported on NASA’s site, which can be seen at http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/. The article is simply more false news.

The article is poorly-written and doesn’t include proper references, but your ignorance on the subject is what led you to your false conclusion.

The article’s many references to satellite data would clue even a minimally-aware reader that the graph and data showing the steep decline in temperatures comes from one of two temperature datasets – UAH and RSS – which are based on the data from NASA satellites. Such a reader would also be aware that GISTEMP, which is the NASA data you linked to, does not come from satellites.

There is not this large one-month fall over land for the UAH algorithm, and differences in trends between the last corrected UAH and the oldest version of UAH are huge. Estimates are very sensitive to the algorithm used to convert the real satelitte measurement in a “low level” temperature (which level ? Why did it change from one UAH version to the other ? What are the sensitivities of the RSS or UAH algorithm ? ).

Based on how I view the graph accompanying this article (and others covering the same period) the period of continuous warming that began in the mid-1970’s ended about 2002 not 1998 so the line representing the average from 1976 to 1998 does not appear meaningful. If Gavin means that the warm years since 2002 are the result of a long-term warming trend he is probably right. It is a trend that began around 1850. But if he is implying that these recent warm years indicate that there is no hiatus in warming since 2002 then he either needs glasses or some instruction on how to read a graph.

The hiatus is visible inside of the two El Niño peaks (1997/98, 2015/16).
But actually, it makes… a pause :-) due to the high temperature increase during the last 12 months.

Imo the best is to show at the results of work done by e.g. Santer, Bonfils & al. who extracted all ENSO signals (El Niño and La Niña) and all volcano activity sequels out of a troposphere temperature record (here: RSS) and obtained a residual warming of about 0.9 °C / century for the period 1979-2013 (the original was at that time at about 1.2 °C).

Yes the original post cherry picked the one metric that did show such a steep drop, namely the tropospheric temperature, above land only, from 70ºS-82.5ºN. The more global products don’t show such a drop because they are not so dominated by the N Hemisphere land (currently winter).

The temperature differences caused by El Nino, La Nina and other short term climate events are distractions and do not define the current hiatus. If the temperature record is predictive then the current hiatus will continue until about 2032.

1. I’m not particularly interested in an opinion from somebody who makes a demand from behind a made up name.

2. The data speaks for itself:

If you can explain why those two datasets, measured by the NASA AQUA satellite, should not be trusted, and that those drops are NOT the steepest in the record, then by all means show me, but put your real name on it.

Anthony.
I offer a very sincere apology.
I had not seen the two charts you have provided.
I assumed David Rose had naively reproduced Roy Spencer’s October chart with what would be needed to make 2016 the warmest on record (drawn as a red dotted line).
Your website is the world’s best as far as I’m concerned.
I have seen it daily for 3 years.
I remain much indebted to you for all your hard work and dedication.

Also, a La Nina is not the opposite of an El Nino. An El Nino releases warm water from beneath the surface of the western tropical Pacific and places that warm water on the surface. A La Nina recharges the heat lost from below the surface of the tropical Pacific by decreasing cloud cover and allowing more sunlight to warm the tropical Pacific to depth.

Hello WUWT!!!! The above quote explains the global temperatures. I’m not a climate scientist, but I have common sense and a background in modeling, and I’ve been endlessly saying if you can explain what is warming the oceans you explain the atmospheric temperatures above them. It is the amount of radiation reaching the oceans that is important, not atmospheric CO2.

Here is the nonsensical argument for atmospheric CO2.

” if you can’t explain how atmospheric CO2 can warm the oceans, you can’t explain why the atmosphere is warming.”

The absorption of the infrared emission from atmospheric greenhouse gases reduces the gradient through the skin layer, the flow of heat from the ocean beneath will be reduced, leaving more of the heat introduced into the bulk of the upper oceanic layer by the absorption of sunlight to remain there to increase water temperature.
That is we are talking NOT about the gradient between sea surface and overlying air, but we are talking about the gradient THROUGH THE SKIN – i.e., the water temperature difference between the top and bottom of the skin layer, which controls how heat flows across this layer, from the bulk of ocean water below to the surface. Obviously, if you heat the top of the skin layer, this reduces the heat flow across this layer from below

Note: the above really only applies fully to calm water.
Turbulent motion (just look at the average sea surface) dominates and of course any warming of the skin layer will get mixed down.

Problems with above explanation.
1) the oceans are never “calm.”
2) CO2 absorbs two very very narrow ranges, 13 to 18µ. H2O absorbs across the IR Spectrum.
3) H2O absorption of IR most likely results in more evaporation, which is endothermic, and would result in cooling, not warming the oceans.

Those are good questions, co2islife. I didn’t write the explanation you referred to, but I think I can provide a bit of insight.
1) “Calm water” makes the explanation simpler to visualize, but I don’t think it was intended as a necessary condition.
2) Certainly CO2 is only part of the radiation back into the oceans — and a small part at that. All the GHGs contribute, along with backradiation from the clouds.
3) More heat cannot logically result in an even greater cooling. If I put a heater in my swimming poll, the water will warm up. Yes, the evaporation will increase, causing some cooling, but the NET effect is warmer water. Same idea with radiation from GHGs. There will certainly be more evaporation with backradiation than with no backradiation, but the NET effect will be warmer water,

1) There is no argument that CO2 absorbs peaks at 2.7, 4.3 and 15µ
2) The absorption of CO2 is logarithmic, so those peaks exist at 50ppm, and are little changed up to where we are today at 400ppm.
3) Looking down from 3km, you can’t identify those absorption peaks because H20 overwhelms the lower atmosphere. Using MODTRAN the impact of CO2 in the lower 0.1km is immeasurable. All ground measurements are located within the lower 0.1km of the atmosphere. Certainly, none are located above 3km.
4) The reason you see those absorption bands looking down from 70km is because all other GHGs have precipitated out of the atmosphere. Atmospheric Temperatures follow H20 and O3, not CO2. CO2 is a constant 400ppm alll the way up to 80km, and yet over that range temperatures fall and then increase with altitude. That can’t be explained by CO2.

Note, temperature in the troposphere is directly correlated with atmospheric H20. As H20 is reduced, so is temperature. CO2 is a constant throughout the troposhere.

3) More heat cannot logically result in an even greater cooling. If I put a heater in my swimming poll, the water will warm up. Yes, the evaporation will increase, causing some cooling, but the NET effect is warmer water.

Not sure that is correct for a select set of wavelengths that don’t penetrate the oceans. A heater is sending our many wavelengths, and thermalizing the atmosphere. IR between 2.7, 4.3 and 15µ are already being absorbed by the H20 in the atmosphere, making CO2 irrelevant, of what small part of the 15µ band that atmospheric H20 misses, it would only activate the top micro-layer of the water. I would imagine this would be more analogous to blowing dry air across the water than using a heater. Blowing air across a sweaty body will cool it, much like IR at 15µ will likely cause evaporation and cooling, not warming. IR at 15µ BTW is consistent with a black body of temperature -80°C, that (-) isn’t a TYPO.

Atomic bomb scientists at Los Alamos during WWII were at a gathering when someone, maybe a wife, made this claim. The room emptied as all the physicists and chemist went back to their apartments to test the claim.

The logarithmic nature of absorption does certainly limit the impact of increased CO2 levels. MODTRAN suggests that moving from 50 –> 400 ppm CO2 changes the outgoing IR by on the order of 10 W/m^2, which I consider more than a “little change”. Going from 300 –> 400 W/m^2 is on the order of 1 W/m^2. This is, yes, a rather small change, but it would have an impact on temperatures.

This part is pretty straightforward. The real challenges come when you try to figure out how the CO2 changes will in turn change other things (like lapse rate and H2O concentrations). In other words, the raw “1 K per doubling of CO2” is not very much up for debate.. The climate sensitivity which could cause a 3-5 K change per double IS somewhat up for debate.

For the impact of CO2, hte better place to look is downward from above the atmosphere (eg 70 km in the MODTRAN model as presented here: http://climatemodels.uchicago.edu/modtran/)
The logarithmic nature of absorption does certainly limit the impact of increased CO2 levels. MODTRAN suggests that moving from 50 –> 400 ppm CO2 changes the outgoing IR by on the order of 10 W/m^2, which I consider more than a “little change”. Going from 300 –> 400 W/m^2 is on the order of 1 W/m^2. This is, yes, a rather small change, but it would have an impact on temperatures.
This part is pretty straightforward.

But here’s the problem with modtran, it isn’t that easy. This is a good example of what I learned with electronics simulators and verifiers, specialized models need good input, and frankly I don’t know modtran well enough, but I was able to emulate increasing water (which I hope emulates increasing rel humidity), and it shuts the optical window down. And the real planet, when rel humidity gets near 100% the outgoing channel closes most of the way down. Because of this, all the linear math adding co2 forcing to the rest of the forcing is wrong.

The real challenges come when you try to figure out how the CO2 changes will in turn change other things (like lapse rate and H2O concentrations). In other words, the raw “1 K per doubling of CO2” is not very much up for debate.. The climate sensitivity which could cause a 3-5 K change per double IS somewhat up for debate.

The total effect is still up for debate, surface temperature night time cooling is strongly regulated by dew points temps.
That’s what this means.

“15µ BTW is consistent with a black body of temperature -80°C, that (-) isn’t a TYPO.”
This is sort of true, but mostly misleading. A BB @ -80 C will have a peak wavelength of about 15 um. That really has noting to do with CO2 radiating @ 15 um. CO2 at any temperature will radiate 15 um IR. Furthermore, CO2 at any temperature above -80 C will radiate MORE 15 um IR than the -80 C BB would.

“Blowing air across a sweaty body will cool it, much like IR at 15µ will likely cause evaporation and cooling, not warming. ”
Everything else being equal, water that receives more 15 um IR will be warmer than water that receives less 15 um IR.
Everything else being equal, warm water evaporates more than cool water.
I can’t see any reasonable scenario where more energy input leads to cooler temperatures.

The logarithmic nature of absorption does certainly limit the impact of increased CO2 levels. MODTRAN suggests that moving from 50 –> 400 ppm CO2 changes the outgoing IR by on the order of 10 W/m^2, which I consider more than a “little change”. Going from 300 –> 400 W/m^2 is on the order of 1 W/m^2. This is, yes, a rather small change, but it would have an impact on temperatures.

1) 1/300 is a negligible amount of additional energy.
2) Simply alter the amount of clouds and/or/H20 and you will see CO2 is dwarfed by other factors
3) According to MODTRAN, CO2 has an immeasurable impact on the lower 0.1km of the atmosphere, regardless of its level.
4) The 1W/M^2 is concentrated in the 13 to 18µ range, consistent with a black body temperature of -80°C , and those wavelengths don’t penetrate or warm water. In fact those wavelengths are absorbed by H20 vapor.

“1) 1/300 is a negligible amount of additional energy.”
Depends on your perspective. It corresponds to about 0.3 C. Some consider that non-negligible, especially if CO2 continues to rise and that temperature continues to get larger.

“2) Simply alter the amount of clouds and/or/H20 and you will see CO2 is dwarfed by other factors”
Yes, this is indeed pretty much the crux of the matter! Other factors make a huge difference, too (and please don’t kid yourself that climate scientists don’t know about anything besides CO2).

However, I doubt you have the power to ‘simply alter the amount of clouds and/or/H20’. Lacking specific knowledge of how these other factors operate, the simplest hypothesis is that “everything else remains the same”. And then we get that ~ 0.3 C warming. Some people contend that feedbacks will MAGNIFY the CO2 forcing, causing a bigger rise. Others claim feedbacks don’t really matter. If you have special insights into this matter, then publish a paper about it.

“3) According to MODTRAN, CO2 has an immeasurable impact on the lower 0.1km of the atmosphere, regardless of its level.”
I think you are trying to use MODTRAN in a way it is not intended. The MODTRAN site takes a given temperature profile in the atmosphere and calculates the radiation that would be expected based on the selected atmospheric composition.

As such, changing the CO2 in the lower atmosphere will indeed have little impact on the surface radiation. But here is the thing. If CO2 changes the energy balance at the very top of the atmosphere, it will change the temperatures at the very top. And because the lapse rate is pretty well fixed, this means that this temperature change will cascade on down through the atmosphere. MODTRAN has no way to model how the temperature of the lower atmosphere would change due to radiation imbalance at the top of the atmosphere.

“4) The 1W/M^2 is concentrated in the 13 to 18µ range, consistent with a black body temperature of -80°C , and those wavelengths don’t penetrate or warm water. In fact those wavelengths are absorbed by H20 vapor.”
This is basically the same misconception I just addressed in (3). It is immaterial if those wavelengths are also emitted by clouds or H2O gas. If changing CO2 at the top has changed the entire temperature profile then the clouds and water themselves would radiate different amounts of IR to the oceans, and THAT will change the water (and land and air) temperature.

Pinching down the far end of a garden hose impacts the flow & pressure at BOTH ends of the hose. :-)

Would someone please explain this chart to me? If it is charting what I think it is saying, this is clear “fraud” and undeniable evidence of manipulating the data to match the results. Trump needs to go after these people. In no other field would this be allowed. The laws don’t cease to exist in the Climate “Science” departments of our liberal universities.

It’s a junk chart from Steven Goddard. I’ve dealt with the maths here. When he describes the adjustments as Average Final minus Average raw, that is not a measure of adjustment at all. They are two different sets of stations. Final is the full set of 1218 stations, where readings for missing stations in a month are estimated. Raw is just the stations that report in that month, which could be about 900 stations. So the difference in those averages is almost entirely because the raw, over time, became a colder group of stations. Not because of adjustments.

I showed that by doing a similar calc in which just the long term means were used in the calculation. It gave a very similar result. The difference is due to the different sets being averaged, not adjustment.

It’s a junk chart from Steven Goddard. I’ve dealt with the maths here.

I’ll have to hand it to the climate “scientists” they can somehow greatly complicate a seemingly simple problem. If you take a sample from any dataset its errors should be normally distributed with equal variance, or homoscedastic. It strikes me that all one needs to do is analyze the “adjustments.” Stephen Goddard’s chart clearly demonstrates a bias to the adjustments. There must be a “Final” data set and an “Adjustment” data set. From those two you can get to the Raw if needed, but you don’t need the Raw when all you are concerned with are the “adjustments.” The AGW model is Temp = f(CO2). The real model is Temp = f(solar radiation reaching earth, atmospheric H2O, log(CO2), etc etc etc). The fact that the AGW believers are using Temp=f(CO2) and not Temp= f(logCO2) demonstrates an ignorance of the physics and mathematics necessary to model AGW. By making the model Temp=f(CO2), what will likely happen, and is happening, is that Temp will increase/decrease without much relationship with CO2. The linear behavior of CO2 will continue upward while temperatures will do what they do. Recently the temperatures have “paused.” The linear relationship therefor breaks down. The only way to maintain that linear model is to “adjust” the temperatures upward so that temperatures increase with CO2. The simple questions then become 1) are the “adjustments” heavily skewed towards (+) 2) have the sizes of the “adjustments” been increasing during the pause? Answer those simple questions and you have your answer as to whether or not this is a fraud or not. Does anyone have the “adjustment” datasets?

It’s elementary in any science. If you want to measure an effect, you either have to have before and after samples, or you need a rigmarole of controls etc to make the samples comparable. If you want to test Dr Seuss patent treatment for baldness, you can do before/after. But if you just take 100 people who have been treated and 100 different ones who haven’t, the difference is likely not due to treatment at all. You might just have chosen a younger group, say.

And that is what happened here. Adjustments changes are small, but differences in climate, say Dakota/Texas, are huge. If what was included in the raw set had just a few more cold places than hot, that will dominate the difference. And as I say, you can test for that by just subtracting the mean of long term averages. You get the same difference as what SG claims are adjustments.

Adjustments in the US at least do tend to increase the trend. The big one is TOBS, and there is a clear reason for that, explained here. For the rest, it seems to be mainly du to the way stations moved, and in older times, to adjsting in effect for the poorer protection from radiant heat. I looked in detail at adjustments in NH here.

co2islife says:
“If you take a sample from any dataset its errors should be normally distributed… ”
No. The errors are distributed however the errors are distributed. Yuu may be thinking of the “central limit theorem”, but that is something else.

” The AGW model is Temp = f(CO2)”
No. If this were true, then climate models would all simply slope upward steadily.

“The new fall in temperatures suggests they were right” is a generalization from specific instances of global temperatures. The problem of how one can generalize from specific instances is the “problem of induction.” This problem has a solution under which the proposition that “the new fall in temperatures suggests they were right” is neither true nor false. Instead, this proposition has a probability of being true. Provided that this probability is conditional there is the possibility of regulating our climate but not otherwise.

Peter L. Ward, a USGS volcanologist, suggested that global warming throughout geologic time has been caused by stratospheric ozone depletion resulting from the release of HCl and HBr by non-explosive, basaltic volcanoes, like the ones in Iceland and Hawai’i. Peter pointed out that Iceland’s Bardarbunga volcano underwent the largest basaltic eruption since Laki in 1783 from August, 2014 to February, 2015. Cl and Br emissions from this eruption would have depleted stratospheric ozone and admitted more high-frequency solar UV-B radiation to cause global warming in 2015-16.